This, the latest edition of the invitation-only journal Midwest Studies in Philosophy, brings
together a dream team of writers on free will and moral responsibility.
Contributions come from a good mix of established stars like Randolph Clarke,
Derk Pereboom and Alfred Mele, rising stars like Manuel Vargas and Dana Nelkin,
and some less familiar names for good measure. Without exception, the papers
are high quality. They are certainly not, however, for those unfamiliar with
these debates: to read this volume is immediately to be thrown into the midst
of ongoing and complex debates.

Since the volume brings together a variety of contributors, arguing from
a variety of perspective, it is impossible, in a short space, to give an
overview of it. Instead, I shall simply and very briefly describe some of its
many highlights:

• Randolph Clarke takes on Strawson’s
  well-known argument for the impossibility of moral responsibility. He
  argues, convincingly, that the concept of responsibility that Strawson is
  operating with is hyperbolic, and that if we substitute a less dramatic
  concept, the argument fails.
• Dana Nelkin examines freedom and
  responsibility in the light of the challenge from situationism in
  psychology – the view that situations, and not character traits, explain
  differences in behavior. Her thorough examination of the situationist
  challenge does not come to any clear conclusion. Rather, she argues that
  situationism threatens some aspects of freedom and responsibility.
  Situationism might provide a partial ground for exculpation, when aspects
  of the situation are obstacles to reasons-responsiveness: in this way,
  situationism can integrate with existing accounts of responsibility.
• Derk Pereboom replies to criticisms of the
  view he expounded in his Living
  Without Free Will, especially challenges from Alfred Mele and Michael
  McKenna. Pereboom’s strategy here follows the traditional incompatibilist
  path of arguing that determined actions cannot be free, for the same
  reasons that manipulated actions are not free.
• In one of the most interesting essays in
  the volume, Michael McKenna examines some possible links between two ways
  of approaching the free will problem that have revolutionized the field
  over the past three decades: Strawson’s reactive attitude account, and
  Frankfurt’s attack on the principle of alternative possibilities. He
  argues that both are based on a quality-of-the-will foundation, according
  to which an agent is responsible for an action if the action reflects her
  will; thus, she is blameworthy just in case her action expresses ill-will.
• Several of the papers are, inevitably,
  devoted to the continuing debate over the principle of alternative
  possibilities. Stewart Goetz returns to the question whether
  Frankfurt-style cases beg the question against libertarianism, while
  Gideon Yaffe continues the debate, in which he has been heavily involved,
  over the relationship between the principle and the Kantian maxim that
  ‘ought’ implies ‘can’. David Widerker’s contribution is also the
  continuation of a debate: Widerker defends his view that agents in
  Frankfurt-style cases are not blameworthy for their wrongful actions because
  it would be unreasonable to expect them to refrain from the action.
  Widerker develops a conception of blame that is preferable, he suggests,
  to the conception he takes to underlie Frankfurty-style compatibilism.
  However it may well be that McKenna’s conception of blame is more adequate
  for the compatibilist, and Widerker’s arguments seem to fail against that conception. Daniel Speak
  explores and defends a version of the principle that incorporates a
  tracing condition, so that an agent is responsible for an action if she
  could have done otherwise at that moment, or could earlier have done something that would have made it
  possible for her to act otherwise. But elsewhere in the volume, Manuel
  Vargas raises some doubts about tracing conditions in general.
• Laura Ekstrom develops an account of
  autonomy that builds upon Frankfurtian themes. She argues that an adequate
  theory of autonomy must give a greater role to rational deliberation and
  to historical factors than Frankfurt allows.
• Saul Smilansky argues that the free will
  problem concerns, most basically, respect for persons, and not
  responsibility. He defends what he calls fundamental dualism: the view
  that some of our attitudes to ourselves and others are compatible with
  determinism and some are not. In order to preserve our compatibilist
  practices, Smilansky argues, we must uphold the illusion that we have
  libertarian free will.
• E.J. Coffman and Ted A. Warfield outline
  and defend against putative counterexamples a version of the common view
  that deliberation presupposes metaphysical freedom, a version they
  attribute to Peter van Inwagen. I and the authors of this fascinating
  paper have discussed it extensively elsewhere,
  so I shall say no more about it here.

I have done no more than outline some (and only some) of the highlights
of this volume. General readers who are gripped by the question of free will
need to look elsewhere, but for specialists in the free will debate, these
papers are indispensable.

© 2005 Neil Levy

Neil Levy is
a research fellow at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics,
University of Melbourne, Australia and is author of Being
Up-To-Date: Foucault, Sartre, and Postmodernity (Peter Lang, 2001), Moral
Relativism: A Short Introduction (Oneworld, 2002), Sartre
(Oneworld, 2002), and What
Makes Us Moral?: Crossing the Boundaries of Biology (Oneworld, 2004).

Categories: Philosophical, Ethics